In the nineteen-eighties, the Internet was a small, decentralized collective of computers. This is not the same Internet we know today. Today most communication flows through a small set of corporations; and thus, falls under the influence of those companies and institutions.

Internet users now regularly submit to terms-of-service agreements that give companies license to share their personal data with other institutions, from advertisers to governments.

Distributed solutions like Mastodon and WebSonar will allow us to start to create outposts that can grow into the better web Berners-Lee envisions, where users control where their data is stored and how it’s accessed.

For example, social networks would still run in the cloud. But you could store your data locally. Alternately, you could choose a different cloud server run by a company or community you trust.

1. nothing.tacowolf.net: suspension
2. soc.jrconlin.com: limitation